According to a report from Symantec Corporation"s own data, pornographic spam comprised just 3% of the total amount of spam in February, the lowest figure ever recorded. Overall, about 70% of the e-mail messages monitored by Symantec were spam, half of which originated from computers in North America. Spammers concentrated on health-related products and other general product pitches. Spam is also increasingly being localized; for example, there was a rise in gambling-related spam in German, Italian and French, while previously it was only mostly in English.
Improvements in blocking and filtering methods have driven spammers to use new techniques to get into inboxes. Some 38% of the spam sent in February used images in messages while others often included text slanted at upward or downward angles. The latter hampers optical character recognition technology in anti-spam technologies.